Poetry |
“My Stone” & “Falling With the Snow”
“It’s not showy / like turquoise / or rose quartz / and will never / find a home / in a bolo tie / or a belt buckle.”
Fiction |
“Woman, Blue”
“The voices had crushed him once, with their weight and numbers, with the fears and anxieties and regrets and the losses they spoke of. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He wouldn’t go back to the hospital.”
Poetry |
“Field Notes: Worcester County, October”
“What seeds itself without my intervention: goldenrod, wood asters, Deptford pinks revealed when storms blow dead leaves west.”
Poetry |
“The Circular Dog” & “The Fragrance of Thunder”
“French fries evoke high school Fridays, / salt stippled to the hope I’d find myself. / A moth tastes pheromones seven miles / from his maple-dark lover.”
Essay |
“My Last Margarita”
“My years of allowing my drinking to increase, of guzzling margaritas, had changed something fundamental. Like my grandfather, I wasn’t capable of cutting down anymore. I either drank or I didn’t.”
Poetry |
“The Con Artist’s Daughter” & “The First Time He Visited His Dead Wife”
“… if I didn’t get caught again // the arrest would be expunged. / I fell in love with that word, / practiced saying it: x-sponged …”
Literature in Translation |
“To Whom It May Concern: On a Poet’s Development”
“Dozens of poetry books could be published without the authors’ names on the cover, because the composers of these books, in essence, are not really authors, but weak-willed mediums of a mode, school or tendency.”
Poetry |
“In memory of always forgetting,” “Pallaksch” & “Copia”
“And a different missing grandfather, / profession pharmacist, / handing his wife Rose a knife and saying — ‘Finish the Job.’ / Anecdote absolute. No before or after.”
Essay |
“Walking, Then Finding Home”
“… every road to school was haunted by the ‘eve-teasers.’ Young men in flared pants, with wavy hair bobbing behind their ears, who leered and jeered at, followed and, at times, assaulted girls with impunity.”
Literature in Translation |
from Lojman
“Selma grabbed the razor from Görkem’s hand. She pressed it against the green cord coming out of the baby’s belly and connecting to something mysterious inside her. In one deft motion, she slashed the cord. She took a piece of twine from her pocket and tied the end.”
Poetry |
“Origin Story,” “Eve” & “To life”
“maybe that’s why // you bloomed in all the wrong ways. you know / the kind of girl you were, the crow growls. // the kind to swallow a rotten apple whole.”
Essay |
“On Arrangement”
“Poetry gave me logics that were affective, associative, metaphorical, linguistic, material, alive to mixed emotions. Its patterns brought me toward things like thoughts. Its thinking wasn’t narrowly systematic. It was systemic.”
Fiction |
“After School Special”
“Because of its location in the back of a mostly evacuated mini-shopping strip, The Falls was always close to empty — the perfect rendezvous point for students joined in something, Liza put it as ‘beyond mere cliquishness.'”
Literature in Translation |
from All Before the Night
“Blind to your destiny / your hand holding your hand, you go off / into the abyss of knowledge.”
Poetry |
“[Sometimes I’ll make a new friend and they may ask about my history]” & “Canada Trip”
“… It was cigarettes over electric bills. / It was one of us. It was both of us. It was one couldn’t drive / and one couldn’t budget.”